The uplink radio resource scheduling in the existing wideband wireless communication system generally follows the following method:
(1) first, the terminal sends a scheduling request or a bandwidth request to the base station according to its own service data amount;
(2) the base station decides whether to allocate uplink radio resources to the terminal or not according to the application of the terminal in conjunction with the channel situation and the service load situation;
(3) if the base station decides to allocate radio resources to the terminal, then it sends an uplink resource allocation signaling to the terminal so as to notify the terminal to use which uplink resource to send data.
The above method can well support the existing services of the mobile terminal, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, web game service, wireless video service, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service, etc.
The above services are mainly applied in Human to Human (H2H) communication, and with the development of Internet of Things, Machine to Machine (M2M) communication (referred to as Machine Type Communication (MTC) in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)) will gradually be introduced into the whole society. The narrow definition of M2M is machine to machine communication, and the broad definition thereof is a networked application and service with the core thereof being the intelligent interaction of the machine terminal. It is an informationization solution provided for the clients with a plurality of communication methods as the access means based on intelligent machine terminals, and is for satisfying the informationization requirements of the clients on aspects such as monitoring, command and scheduling, data collection and measurement, etc.
In the application of M2M, there are very broad service types, such as home metering, industrial production meter automation, water quality monitoring, intelligent traffic, asset tracking, etc., and in these service types, the size of the uplink (UL) data transmission of some services is one or more fixed, for example, some instrument meters in the industry production, portable health monitor, and equipment in the asset tracking field, and the size of the uplink data transmission of some services fluctuates but not fixed, such as consumption electronic device, intelligent traffic system, etc. However, as to the network side, its scheduling flow does not differentiate whether the uplink data size of the service is fixed or not, and in the existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, when a terminal in the connected state has UL data to be transmitted, the following steps have to be performed (referring to FIG. 1):
when the terminal has UL data to be transmitted (step S110), the terminal sends a scheduling request (SR) to the network element in the access network (in the LTE, the network element in the access network is an eNodeB (eNB)) (step S120); the network element in the access network carries out first UL resource scheduling on the terminal (step S130), and the first allocated UL resource is usually small so as to avoid waste caused by too many allocated resources; the terminal sends a buffer status report (BSR) on the UL resource allocated by the network element in the access network to the network element in the access network to report the data amount size to be uploaded (step S140), and the network element in the access network carries out subsequent UL resource scheduling on the terminal according to the BSR (step S150).
The application inventors of the present invention have found:
as to such M2M service with unfixed UL data amount transmitted each time, it is necessary for the terminal to send an SR and a BSR to the eNB since the UL data amount is unpredictable;
however, as to such M2M service with fixed or regular UL data amount transmitted each time, it is redundant for the terminal to send an SR and a BSR to the eNB since the UL data amount is predictable. In addition, during the first UL resource scheduling after the network element in the access network receives the SR, since the UL data amount to be transmitted is unknown, the network element in the access network usually will allocate fewer UL resource to the terminal so as to avoid waste, which further causes delay to the packet transmission of the terminal and reduction to the data throughput of the terminal. Especially when M2M is widely applied and M2M equipment is widely used, such redundancy will form considerable addition signaling overhead, influence the system throughput, as well as bring additional UL scheduling delay; and the packet transmission delay of the terminal will also reduce the satisfaction of feeling from the terminal.